Fantasy Football Meets Sales: This Startup Shows How Salespeople Can Have More Fun At Work

Fantasy football can cost companies up to billions of dollars worth of productivity each season, but Chattanooga-based startup Ambition believes it can actually boost sales - if used in the right way.

Ambition, which just came out of Y Combinator this year, offers sales productivity software that takes a fantasy football-style approach to track and motivate sales teams.

It groups each sales member into separate teams, where they compete over a variety of categories, like the number of sales leads generated, phone calls made, or profit reached. Each metric, updated in real time from CRM sources like salesforce.com, is matched against custom benchmark goals, which generates an "Ambition" score that determines the winner.

"Our goal is to make the work environment more fun, engaging, and motivating, while driving more profit for the companies," Ambition co-founder Travis Truett told Business Insider.

Although it may sound like a simple program, Ambition is actually a data-heavy solution. It provides individualized benchmarks using its own algorithm and pulls out actionable data from previous results that companies could use to further drive sales.

Most of its staff has data science experience from places like Google, NASA, Facebook, and Cisco.

But what really matters is that its clients are seeing immediate productivity growth. One of its clients in the logistics business saw its outbound calls and monthly sales grow 50% in the first 12 weeks of using Ambition. An insurance company said its average daily sales more than doubled as a result of it.

That's why its 16-member staff has been able to raise funding from Google Ventures, SV Angel and Redpoint Ventures. They only have about 30 clients so far, but some big names that stick out are Dropbox, Clayton Homes and Deal.com.

Truett said demand is growing and his team is quickly expanding, too. But he has much bigger goals than just being a sales boosting tool.

"We started with sales, but our long-term goal is to work with any metric-based person, team, or company," Truett said.

Here's how Ambition actually works:

This is your personal page, where you can see your performance in real time and how it stacks up against your benchmark goal. You get 100 points if you meet all of your goals, and over 100 points if you exceed your goals.

This is the team page with a list of your team members and scores. It also shows your team ranking and record.

Here's a head-to-head results page that shows how your weekly match up is going. You can trash talk, too!

You can pull up individual rankings for each metric. It also breaks down the scores against each of the target benchmark.

It also shows the league standings and weekly top players. You can also see previous season's data.